The egg
by Schutziege
Summary: This is the story of how Iceland got his puffin "pet." Norway is trying to teach his little brother how to hunt puffins but things don't really go as planned. Oneshot. Human names used. Don't worry, no puffins actually harmed in the story. Reviews are always highly appreciated.


**AN: To avoid confusions. Egill is Iceland and Kjetil is Norway. Thank you.**

May was about to end soon. Summer was finally coming. There were countless odd fowls bustling about on the shore. Birds, colored black and white, whose eyes looked as if they had put on a clown make up. Their beaks seemed huge but when they were looked at from above, one could see that they were actually very tapered. The birds' mitts were red and the beaks were very colorful. They had red, yellow, gray and even blue stripes. There were tens and tens of those birds, although some other species had also blended into the swarm. A colony this big could only mean one thing. That is, the puffins' nesting had started.

However, puffins were not the only odd things there. Some other two-legged creatures came to a nearby hillock. But they certainly weren't birds. They were humans. Other of them was a very young man, one could only wonder if he was even eighteen years old. Another one was a little boy, tagging along behind the older one. He seemed not to be more than six years old. They had come there from a nearby village.

"There they are", stated the older boy, pointing at the colony with his finger, "they nest here every year."

They were called Kjetil and Egill, two orphaned brothers. Other people from their home village would have been very keen to help the two boys as much as possible, but Kjetil, older brother, was very skeptical about them. He manages very well with his little brother without help. Maybe even better than what he would with everybody breathing his air.

"What are they?" Egill asked, looking at the teeming birds.

"They're puffins, those funny-looking birds", answered Kjetil. He took his brother's hand and lead him closer to the coast. Little brother smiled at the birds. He liked them.

"Today I'm going to teach you to hunt puffins", Kjetil stated.

"Hunt?" Egill wondered.

"That's right. Roasted puffin is delicious. And you like it as well, don't you?"

"Not if it's made of living puffins!" Egill shuddered at the thought. Seemingly nobody had ever told him that the birds had to be hunted before any meat could be gotten from them.

"Come on now", Kjetil smiled at his little brother's words and showed a wooden stick which he had brought with him. There was a net attached to the end of it.

"First you'll catch the bird with this. And then you can break its neck", he explained.

"But doesn't it bother the other puffins that you take one of their friends?" Egill asked. Confused, Kjetil blinked his eyes: "W- well I don't know. At most their spouse, I guess."

"Do they have spouses? In that case you can't hunt them. No one wants their spouse to be taken away", Egill twitched Kjetil's sleeve.

"Listen. I promise I'll only hunt puffins that don't have a spouse. Is that okay with you?" big brother wiped sweat away from his forehead. Of course he actually couldn't tell which puffins had spouses and which didn't, but at least this way he could make Egill's disapproval end.

"I guess that's okay", the boy smiled. Kjetil nodded and looked very pleased: "Good. First I'll show you how it's done and then you can try."

Egill nodded and sat on a rock. He looked at his brother who waded among the puffins, trying to find a good target. But the little boy's patience didn't last for too long. He started to look around and soon forgot about Kjetil. He saw one puffin that was diverged from the swarm and was waddling towards him.

"Are you a puffin-mum?" Egill asked when he thought the bird was close enough to hear.

"Do you want to show me your nest?" he said and settled on the ground on all fours to be on the same level as the puffin. When it saw Egill's face, the bird suddenly turned around and started to waddle back to other puffins. Egill assumed that it wanted to show him its nest, so he followed it. But after crawling among the puffins for a while, he could no longer tell which one he was supposed to follow. He halted and tried to call: "Where did you go, puffin-mum?"

It's not hard to guess that none of the puffins answered. Chagrined, Egill crawled around and tried to find a puffin's nest although he didn't even know what it should look like. As he came close, the puffins stepped away a bit but didn't really take flight. A crawling weirdo like that can't be very dangerous, they thought. The dangerous ones are those bipedal guys who swing around that cane of death.

"Where are all your nests?" Egill started to become even more frustrated. He stretched his neck to see over the puffins' heads but it was a bad idea to turn his eyes away from his hands. Suddenly there wasn't rock under his left hand. There was a pit in which his whole arm sank into. Egill shrieked in fear of falling down. But he didn't fall. He opened his eyes and saw that he had tucked his hand into a hole on the rock. On the bottom of it there was something soft and damp. Egill frowned and pulled his hand away from the hole. It was a bit muddy. Then the boy peeked in there. His face lit up with delight.

Kjetil straightened his back. He had finally caught one of the puffins which was now thrashing, tangled up in the net. The other ones had run away from the young man. He turned around to look at the rock where he had left his little brother to, but the boy wasn't there anymore.

"Oh no! I should have seen this coming", Kjetil exclaimed in frustration. Of course Egill doesn't mean it, but he is sometimes very disobedient. Kjetil went back to the rock and stepped onto it. He was still dragging the puffin behind him. But Egill was nowhere to be seen. Kjetil was so annoyed that he tossed his stick to the ground. When it noticed its chance had come, the puffin started to waddle back towards the others even though it was still tangled up in the net and had to drag the stick as well.

"Egill!" Kjetil tried to call his brother's name. He didn't notice the prey's escape.

When he heard his big brother's shout, Egill stood up and tried to see where Kjetil was. He was standing on the rock where Egill was supposed to be.

"I'm here!" Egill yelled. Kjetil finally saw him and yelled back: "Why on earth did you fool go there!"

"Come and see what I found!"

Kjetil sighed and started to walk towards his little brother through the swarm. When he finally reached Egill, the boy was jumping up and down: "There is a puffin's nest and it has an egg!"

"Really. Can we continue now?" Kjetil tried but Egill wasn't listening: "Look at it! Why isn't its mum there?"

"I don't know", Kjetil muttered and finally knelt down to look at the egg in the nest.

"Has its mum abandoned it? Or has she been hunted?" the boy looked at his brother and sounded somewhat accusing.

"Oh well, that may be the case. But that's just how things go", Kjetil answered.

"We must take that egg with us and take care of it!" Egill pulled Kjetil's sleeve with his dirty hand. He sighed: "That's not a good idea. You don't even know anything about raising birds."

"But you know! That's why you will help me!" Egill begged. Kjetil sighed again. Why did the boy have to find that nest? It just made things troublesome. Egill reached his hand into the hole, took the egg from there and pressed it gently against his chest.

"You can't prevent me from taking it", he stated.

"Are you absolutely sure that its mum hasn't gone to eat or something?" Kjetil tried to change his brother's mind. His biggest concern was that the egg may not even be alive at all. Or what if it never hatched? Or if the bird died almost immediately? It wouldn't be a nice experience for a young boy like Egill.

"Then it's a lousy mum! No mum would ever abandon their child just to go eat something!" Egill argued. Kjetil sighed and patted the boy's head: "Okay, you win. But remember that it is a living creature. You can't just get tired of it. And you have to take good care of it."

Egill smiled widely and hugged his big brother. But of course he did it gently so that the egg wouldn't be harmed.

"I'm a puffin mum!" he said.

"Dad", Kjetil corrected, feeling a little awkward.

"No. Mum!" Egill looked up at Kjetil's face.

"Okay then, I guess it doesn't matter."

"Hey Kjetil?"

"Yes?"

"Where is that stick thing of yours?"

Kjetil flinched as he remembered his puffin-prey and the stick.

"Jævla!" he shouted and started to run back to where he had left his stick. Well, he couldn't really run because of the puffins. It was more like walking at average speed and swearing loudly.

In the end what happened was that they found the stick lying on the ground among the puffins. But the prey had fled and the net had been torn apart. Kjetil was so embarrassed over the whole thing that he told the older men of the village that the net had been torn by sharp rocks on the shore. He didn't want others to laugh at him. It would have been impossible to admit that a puffin got away by tearing the net itself. In fact, this incident left the young man so sour that he didn't want to hunt puffins for the rest of the year. He didn't agree to to eat any puffin meat either. He started to claim that he "hated" it and said that from now on he would only eat fish. Egill, in other hand, had no problem with eating puffin meat. As he said, it hadn't been made of living birds so he was okay with it.

But what happened to the egg? Egill carried it with him all the time. Eventually Kjetil bought him a pouch made of leather so that the boy would be able to carry the egg against his chest. Egill told that he wanted to have a girl puffin. To that Kjetil answered that he wasn't sure how to identify a puffin's gender. Egill didn't seem to mind. Excited, he went on about how nice it would be to teach tricks to the puffin.

Well, did the egg hatch in the end? Yes, it did. But that, that is a completely different story.

**Another AN: Mm, so I hope you liked it. Please tell me if you find mistakes.**


End file.
